Ship Hijack Suspects Facing Weapons Trial

GENOA, ITALY — Five men accused in the hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro will go on trial Monday on weapons charges, a public prosecutor announced Wednesday.

The five include four Arabs who seized the ship Oct. 7 and an alleged fifth member of the hijack gang who was arrested in Genoa Sept. 28, five days before the Achille Lauro sailed on its ill-fated Mediterranean cruise.

Assistant public prosecutor Luigi Meloni, one of three Genoa magistrates in charge of the investigation, told a news conference the five Arabs will face trial on secondary weapons charges in a Genoa criminal court Monday.

The charges to be heard next week include smuggling into Italy and possession of four Kalashnikov submachine guns, eight hand grenades and nine detonators--the weapons used in the hijacking.

The five, along with 11 others against whom arrest warrants have been issued, will be tried at a later date on the more serious charges of murder, hijacking and mass kidnaping.

Legal authorities agreed to proceed to trial on the weapons charges under an ``express`` procedure which dispenses with the normal requirement for a lengthy pretrial investigation.

The weapons offenses carry possible penalties ranging from 3 to 12 years in jail.

Meloni, who was flanked at the news conference by Judge Luigi Carli, his main assistant in the investigation, identified the four men who surrendered after the Achille Lauro hijacking and were subsequently forced to Italy by U.S. jets as:

-- Magied Youssef Molqi, 23, born in Jordan;

-- Ahmad Marrrouf Assadi, 23, born in Damascus, Syria;

-- Ibrahim Fatayer Abdelatif, born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1965;

-- Bassam Ashker, 19, born in Tripoli, Lebanon.

-- Mohamed Kalaf, 20, who was born in Damascus.

Although born in various Arab countries, investigators said all the Arabs were believed to be of Palestinian origin.

In a related development in Nicosia, Cyprus, two Palestinians and an Englishman Wednesday were ordered to stand trial Jan. 20 for killing three Israelis in the Larnaca marina, which precipitated a retaliatory Israeli raid on PLO headquarters in Tunis, Tunisia.

Acting on the recommendation of the island`s attorney general, the court agreed to dispense with the customary preliminary inquiry and ordered that the three men continue to be held at the Nicosia Central Prisons where they occupy different cells.